[Wikipedia-l] readability of recentchanges

Wed Feb 12 22:17:00 UTC 2003

> Hello,

> After the last update which included the links to the user:discussion page
> (which is certainly useful) I have problems to scan RecentChanges for the
> really important things, i.e. the articles which were modified. In English
> it is not such a big problem because "diff" and "hist" and "talk" (and
> "block") are a lot shorter than "Unterschied" "Versionen", "Diskussion"
> and "blockieren" but German RecentChanges are at the moment almost
> unreadable for me.

I like neither the long version nor the short version, and the Enhanced RC  
is a mess when it comes to link titles (sorry, Magnus). The fact that  
we're not using tables yet makes RC even harder to navigate.

I'm considering the following:

1) Use tables, as shown here:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_Changes_redesign

2) Use icons for some stuff (User talk, block IP, diff, history, perhaps  
the minor/new identifiers which are confusing to newbies)

3) Use two lines per change if necessary to get decent link titles

The "cur/last" links are IMHO the most confusing of them all, and "hist"  
is pretty bad as well. Even by trial and error it's tricky to find out how  
the diff stuff works, and that is really one of our most elementary  
functions.

So, yes, this needs to be overhauled. I'm currently hacking on the history  
page, and I hope I'll find some time to work on RC as well.

Regards,

Erik